Download and load spaCy models on-the-fly

A tiny drop-in replacement for spacy.load() that automatically downloads a model when it is not currently installed.

pip install spacy_download

Usage is identical to spacy.load(), meaning that you can also exclude or disable pipeline components. Example:

from spacy_download import load_spacy

# Will download the model if it isn't installed yet
nlp = load_spacy("en_core_web_sm", exclude=["parser", "tagger"])  

Under the hood, the package makes use of spaCy's capability to import models as modules, rather than using spaCy's built-in loader. This allows us to first download a model with pip and then load it as a module.

Note: if you are using transformer models, you still need to install spacy-transformers yourself!

WARNING: loading models on the fly can be useful, but it is not an officially supported feature. It should work fine with the official models at the time of writing, but I cannot guarantee that this will always be the case. Use at your own risk.